


c:\RESET.exe /wakeup

by kalypsobean



Category: NieR: Automata (Video Game)
Genre: Androids, Bloodplay, M/M, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-20
Updated: 2017-12-20
Packaged: 2019-02-17 14:36:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13078965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalypsobean/pseuds/kalypsobean





	c:\RESET.exe /wakeup

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wiseorfool](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wiseorfool/gifts).



He couldn't breathe. They couldn't breathe. It was a strange and unfamiliar sensation, one that made each movement feel slow and heavy, as if they had to push through the air itself to move, as if the air was a blanket and comforting. It would be like they were human, and just going to sleep...

 

They wake up surrounded by white. Their senses are returned to them, and the darkness is gone; there are walls, luminescent, jagged, and they can feel them as an extension of themselves. It is, as if, they built this for themselves, a sanctuary, pure and clean and light, away from YoRHa and its dirty, infected core. 

They wish for a place to go, and here one is, slicing the very darkness and making them a path, far from the destroyed surface and the ruined settlements. This had not lain abandoned and welcomed trees and facsimiles of animals for company; it had chosen them for its purpose, it had chosen to shelter them.

They were special. They were chosen.

They were alive.

 

The city crafts itself around them, gives them all they need at only the thought; it is as if they are not just refugees, taking whatever sanctuary was available, but welcome, honoured guests. The city takes them to ruins, ones that YoRHa had long abandoned, and offers them knowledge. It protects them, from the rain that brings decay and destruction, from the earth when it rolls and splits, from the tides as they rise and shift, unsettled.

The city is a part of them as much as they are part of each other. They would be as lost without it as if they would if one of them had fallen to the dark, slowing until they no longer moved.

 

They adapt; they survive. They grow strong, under the city's care. 

 

It never occurs to them that it might not be enough.

 

>>!<<

 

The city breathes on its own, and it had before it had found them, before it had taken them in and gave them all it could. It, too, had fought for life, once; it had been small, mobile, before it had been this. But it had not been _alive_. 

It watches them grow as they take from it everything it offers; they become stronger, faster, smarter. 

Every time they bleed, it, too, becomes stronger.

 

The world shifts again, as it always does, but this time it feels different. It is awake, and it knows. It is _exposed_. 

 

They were loud, the new ones, not malleable, not willing to share; it crafted a wall from their remains, so that no more would come, but it was not enough. It could not silence their memories and so it slept, finding only in stillness the silence it had so treasured, before they came. 

 

>>!<<

 

It was like waking up; as if before he was in a fog, distant and scattered, and then, they weren't. They were clear and pure, in a way they had never been; he could see, and he could understand, and there were things he knew that he did not understand.

He also felt, for the first time, that he was alone. Where there had always been a faint noise, an awareness, something, there was nothing; he did not instinctively know where his brother was, or feel the city humming around him as it reformed itself, absorbing parts and materials to become something bigger, something new, that he could no longer navigate simply by thinking of where he wanted to go.

 

He was alone; he had a name, but no reason for being, no frame in which to set his existence. It was freedom, but he felt powerless and small, for there seemed nothing to do, no place for him and only him. The world was in disarray and much of it was beyond his knowledge, that he had now no way of acquiring.

There was only Eve, and he, too, was lost; for Eve, though, it seemed that he was simply adrift, as if in the absence of orders he had not the will to drive his own actions. The silence was not overwhelming, but he missed knowing his brother was nearby, being able to feel Eve's thoughts and calculate where he was; he did not know it had comforted him until now, when it was gone. 

 

He found Eve sitting at a table, in a facsimile of a dining room. For a moment, he let himself rest; the room was familiar and complete, and without the unease that came from discordance and uneven shadows, he was able to focus. It was the first time he saw his brother, free of the noise of the system and without feeling something back. 

It was the way Eve looked back at him, the same but not, as if for the first time, as if he were a stranger, that hurt the most. They had potentially forever to remain here, in this city that had cocooned them, and Adam did not want to spend it without Eve, not this way.

It was a human thing, to want connection, to seek it out and claim it, but the silence left far too much room in his mind for his liking, and he did not want to die that way, going still and lifeless for being so lost in his thoughts he could not find his way back. Eve was lost, too; Eve reached out to him, and there was much in that gesture for Adam to understand. Eve did not want the silence either, or the space, but he also did not want the freedom; he wanted to follow, if Adam led.

Eve's body was cool and smooth, the synthetic skin soft under Adam's fingers. This is how it would be for them if nothing was done - the human way, of expressing intimacy only through touch, guessing at thoughts and meanings. 

"Please," said Eve. Adam was unused to hearing, and the extra time between the word and understanding it was unacceptable.

 

They did not need swords; they had left their weapons behind long ago, when they had first been abandoned, and in any case, it was fitting that Adam do this with his own hands. He settled over Eve, close enough that he could feel warmth from the processes beneath Eve's skin. He savoured it for a moment, but found it a poor substitute for the knowing he sought; he wanted that warmth to stay, to not be a byproduct, to be a choice. It guided him, though, and for that he was grateful.

He sliced through Eve's skin with his nails. He aimed for the processors, though he did not need to be exact, and that meant Eve's chest, where a human heart would be. For a moment, he could see himself becoming one with Eve; even as the image occurred to him, though, he also knew it would not achieve his goal, for though he would remain connected to his brother, he would not retain the freedom he is already acclimating to. Instead, he worked in layers, scratching over the same marks until they are almost deep enough for Eve's blood to flow freely. Eve started to fall lax, as if the pain had overloaded him, and Adam shifts, easing back onto the table so that he has room to lift Eve from the chair; he held his brother against his chest and leaned down, until the table took Eve's weight and he's able to move. He started making the same marks on his own chest in conscious disregard of the pain; his system's warning that this was wrong much less important than righting their connection. 

His conductive fluid began to leak at the same time the pain became more focused; the tips of his fingers reflected light as he reached back to Eve, and he thought, for a moment, that it was appropriate that the thing which would connect them looked so ephemeral. 

Then he reached into Eve's chest and pulled, just enough, that the last thing he would remember would be the first whisper of Eve's mind, back where it belonged.

 

>>!<<

 

It watches over them as they sleep, as their bodies heal; it can hear them dreaming, as if it, too, became a part of their family. It brings them parts from the army it had killed, so that they can heal. It keeps them safe and it watches, as they wake, as they read and learn and...

then it becomes still. It waits, still incomplete, for Adam to call.


End file.
